What was the final Pink Floyd album to feature Roger Waters?
No band is meant to stay together forever. Although most people revel in the opportunity to play music with their friends, it’s impossible to have everyone on the same page for that long without someone either getting bored or trying their best to twist the music in different directions. Roger Waters was definitely up to his fair share of twisting, but by the time he started working on Pink Floyd’s later work in the 1980s, he felt that it had reached the end of the line.
Then again, some of the best music the group ever made came with Waters at the helm. His voice wasn’t exactly Freddie Mercury-level brilliant or anything, but in terms of the group’s vision, Wish You Were Here, and Animals work incredibly well as musical pieces because of the thematic elements running through everything.
But if The Wall was the culmination of everything that Waters had worked towards, The Final Cut was where everything started to go sour. Although an extension of The Wall wasn’t a bad idea on paper, having the entire operation be nothing but B-sides from the rock opera did nothing to endear it to fans worldwide.
Although there are a lot of good production ideas on the record, there are still pieces that don’t seem to work all that well, with David Gilmour calling it one of their weakest efforts years later.
While there was no reason to think that Pink Floyd would break up, people got the shock of a lifetime when Waters announced that he had run his course with the group.
So, why did Roger Waters leave Pink Floyd?
Following the release of The Final Cut, it was clear that something needed to change. Waters had held the band steady throughout The Wall, but this was now a glorified Roger Waters solo album with the rest of the group serving as backing musicians. Despite Waters’s original idea to break up Pink Floyd, it did at least make sense as to why he felt that he had the chance to bow out gracefully.
The Wall was everything that he had worked towards, so now that it was finished, Waters had thought to leave the legacy where it was and move on to other things. He had already been in tense relationships with David Gilmour and had to fire Richard Wright, so it was only natural that the group would work better separately than apart. That’s not what the rest of the band wanted to hear, which led to Waters suing them over the rights to the name and Gilmour continuing on with Nick Mason as Pink Floyd for the rest of their days.
But what did Pink Floyd do after Roger Waters’s departure?
It’s never easy trying to replace someone many would consider a group leader. The band already had to deal with Syd Barrett losing his battle with his mental health, and now that Waters was gone, Gilmour was the only one left to steer the ship alongside Nick Mason. While A Momentary Lapse of Reason felt like the Gilmour equivalent of The Final Cut, the last years of recorded output at least got them back to sounding like themselves.
Across albums like The Division Bell, Wright’s return behind the keyboards gave them more of that signature progressive sound back. They even managed work outside the confines of their usual tunes, including making tunes out of jam sessions like on ‘Marooned’ and what would later turn up on The Endless River. The group did bury the hatchet with Waters for a good half-hour of live material at Live 8, but there’s a good chance that fans will never see them reunited ever again.
